The Healing of Suffering

Punta de Vacas, May 4, 1969

This is Silo's first public expression of his ideas. In poetic language, he explains that the most important knowledge for living ("true wisdom") is not the same as the knowldge found in books—knowledge of universal laws or things of that nature—but is a question of inner experience. The most important knowledge for living is related to comprehending suffering and how to surpass it.

You wish to impose your way of life upon another; you wish to impose your vocation upon another. But who has told you that you are an example that must be followed? Who has told you that you can impose a way of life because it pleases you? What makes your way of life a model, a pattern that you have the right to impose on others?

You must understand that this suffering is always rooted in the violence that exists in your own consciousness. You suffer because you fear losing what you have, or because of what you have already lost, or because of what you desperately long to reach. You suffer because of what you lack, or because you fear in general. These, then, are the great enemies of humanity: fear of sickness, fear of poverty, fear of death, fear of loneliness.